Intelligence In The Universe

Andrew Watson, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain, has published an article in Astrobiology in which he argues intelligence is rare in the universe. He bases his case in biology, essentially arguing that intelligence requires billions of years to evolve-- using Earth as a model-- and that the average star is only stable enough to nurture life around it for a few billion years.

That is fundamentally the same argument biologists have tended to use for decades when addressing this question. Biology is complex, they say, and requires immense amounts of time to produce new forms. In fact, some evolutionary biologists argue evolution works in fits and starts; under the right circumstances, new life forms can emerge relatively quickly. Indeed, for billions of years the only life on Earth seems to have been single cell organisms. Multicellular life only arose around 600 million years ago. Once the multicellular threshold was crossed, it could be argued, complexity exploded. That explosion led to intelligence in fairly short order-- and intelligence reached its current level in humans.

Intelligence, of course, could have faltered along the way, but astronomers are confident there are millions or billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy alone. When asked how the capability to migrate to other star systems would change his conclusion, Professor Watson acknowledged that would change the situation completely.

Indeed it would-- and humans could be only centuries away from that capability.